The word baizuo is, according to political scientist Zhang Chenchen, a Chinese word that ridicules Western “liberal elites”. He further defined the word “baizuo” with the definition “People who only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

The Twitter Rules. You also may not affiliate with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. We will begin enforcing this rule around affiliation with such organizations on December 18, 2017. [Twitter.com]

Supposedly this new Twitter rule will be going into effect today, with people who violate it having their accounts banned. However, this is obviously not going to happen. If it did, every account associated with any government would be banned, as would anyone affiliated with any government (including employees and businesses that do business with governments). Since this covers not just activity but statements, mainstream media sources such as the New York Times and CNN would also be banned.

But of course this is Twitter, so they’ll actually just be banning people who aren’t sufficiently enthusiastic Social Justice Warriors, because anything that makes a pinko sad is literally violence.

Private property ownership has nothing even remotely to do with political borders. Property lines are determined nonaggressively, they are subject to market forces, owners are strictly limited in what they can do by considerations of proportionality and equal liberty (if you smoke in my house or trespass on my lawn I have a right to throw you off my property; I don’t have a right to lock you in a cage or throw you out of the country). They are wildly different in scope and powers granted and processes by which they are established, enforced, divided and reallocated. One is a spatial expression of individual liberty and the other is a collective assault upon it. Equating the two is sophistry on a par with “Banks are a good place to put your money. The Mississippi River has two banks. Therefore, the side of the Mississippi River is a good place to leave your money.”

Awdal State wasn’t declaring independence from Somalia. It was declaring independence from Somaliland, a secessionist movement that’d declared its independence from Somalia two decades prior. And the Awdalites didn’t want their own independence. They wanted autonomy (including their own president) within Somalia. And when I say “Awdalites,” I don’t actually mean people in Awdal. The hall with all those awkward dancers was in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The government election later that year took place in London. And the president they wound up electing was a middle-aged dude living permanently in Ottawa, whose day job was stuffing flyers into a local paper.

Do I as an individual have a right to use force upon my neighbor to accomplish this goal? If I do have such a right, then I may delegate that power to my government to exercise on my behalf. If I do not have that right as an individual, then I cannot delegate it to government, and I cannot ask my government to perform the act for me.

A lot of Americans aren’t interested in debating or thinking about policy. They just want to blame someone, preferably someone they’ve already been socialized to despise, be they the rich, the poor, the white, the black, as long as there’s no blame left for them.

In recent years it’s been common for neo-Nazis to oppose Muslims living in the US by claiming that they want to impose shariah here. However, that’s just an Arabic word for laws inspired by religion–what used to be criticized here as “legislating morality” before most of the critics started doing it themselves. The truth is that the US is already dominated by shariah laws, many of which have the full approval and support of the neo-Nazis. Not a single one of them was inspired by Islam, though–in the US they almost all come from Christianity and Environmentalism. I decided to keep a list of every news story I saw about a shariah law in the US for a month, and here it is:

Much of what passes for political argument is not merely fallacious and unconvincing, but not even intended to be convincing. It’s only a fig leaf so people can pretend to have a reason other than their real reason for voting as they do. It’s not intend to be analyzed, it’s merely to be pointed at.

Oberlin Students Accuse the Cafeteria of Cultural Appropriation. But cultural appropriation in the cafeteria isn’t the only thing on the minds of Oberln students. Activists recently released a lengthy list of demands—many of them reminiscent of the demands made by students at dozens of other universities. Perhaps most notable: Oberlin students want blacks-only safe spaces and allowance money for black student leaders. [Hit & Run]

It’s a bit depressing that I’m now in a position to say, “I’m old enough to remember when segregation was almost universally regarded as a bad thing.”